


Finders' Wealth

by sterlinglee



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Fate & Destiny, M/M, Urban Fantasy, mundane magic au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-15
Updated: 2015-05-15
Packaged: 2018-03-30 16:54:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3944395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sterlinglee/pseuds/sterlinglee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a city that teems with small magics, strange whispers, a million crossed threads and singing wires, Akaashi Keiji meets a guy he can't forget.  It's probably a coincidence.</p><p>In a city warm with the pulse of a pattern too large to make out, Bokuto Koutaro finds a guy he definitely, absolutely wants to know better.  And there's no way it's a coincidence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Finders' Wealth

A girl finds Bokuto at his usual spot, hanging out by the park fountain under his handmade FINDER’S MAGIC sign and trying to look esoteric. Sarukui had nixed the stuffed owl without even listening to his list of reasons why it would be really great for promotion and stuff, so he’s feeling a little lonely at work today.  
  
“You lose it, I can find it, I’ve got the knack!” he calls as the girl makes her way closer. “Within reason, of course.” That part of the sales pitch had been Saru’s idea too. Bokuto’s knack has definitely led him to some things outside reason—just ask Konoha. Konoha has some stories.  
  
“I didn’t actually lose anything,” the girl shrugs and takes a bit of her Mister Donut. She has a mild, inquisitive look, and he likes her immediately. “I need a restaurant, actually.”  
  
“Hey hey, no prob,” Bokuto leaps to his feet. “You could’ve gone to Google but you came to me, I like the way you think!” They share a grin. This morning alone he’s used his knack to track down three hats, a cell phone, a six-year-old, and a stuffed elephant named Misa-chan. He’s on his game.  
  
“I figured someone with a knack like yours would be better with the personal touch,” she says. “I’m feeling like…somewhere with really good handmade noodles. And where the complimentary pickles don’t run out.” Her expression goes a little dreamy and he very distinctly hears her stomach growl. “Oh, and cute waitresses.”  
  
“All right, gimme a minute,” he says—his mind is already on the move. It’s harder when the client doesn’t know exactly what they're looking for, but Bokuto has been at this for a long time, and after all, this is his city. He closes his eyes, letting his mind’s eye reinforce the image she’s created. A cook’s deft hands coated in flour, swinging the mass of fresh noodles and dropping them against the counter. Steam curling up from rich broth, a girl’s laughter in the fragrant room. And there, there’s that familiar tug behind his sternum, like a magnet guided by an attracting field. The place is out there.  
  
When he opens his eyes the destination is fixed in his internal compass—ever since he was a little kid he’s had this unerring finder’s knack rooted in blood and bone, like the instinct that leads migratory birds home.  
  
Sometimes he wonders if he should be spending so much time finding things for other people. But keyrings, blind dates, bus stations—they’re easier than _where am I and where will I be? Where are the people I was meant to be beside?_  
  
“You ready?” he bounces a little on his toes, eager as always to satisfy the magnet’s pull. “There’s a place not too far from here. I can take you there in, hey, maybe ten minutes?” She nods, and they set off among the crowds.  
  
The wide boulevards of downtown give way to narrower, homier streets—by the time Bokuto leads the girl around a corner and up to the warmly lit storefront of her noodle joint, they’re fast friends debating the merits of ramen broth versus phō. She’s about to go in when the door opens and a guy about their age emerges, his dark eyes distant. Bokuto’s internal compass whirls dizzily before re-orienting itself.  
  
“’Scuse me,” the stranger says. There’s a complex twining of brown thread around his right wrist, raised like a scaffold on his outstretched middle and index fingers. A mottled feather is tangled in it, and a bell, and a couple beads that catch the light in ways anyone but a witch would find odd.  
  
“That’s kind of an awful finding charm,” Bokuto blurts out. “The feather should probably be like, way closer to your distal—”  
  
“ _Excuse_ me?” The guy says again. His tone is even and eviscerating, sharp enough to sew Bokuto’s lips together. The girl covers her mouth to keep down laughter.  
  
“ _Nothinggg_ ,” Bokuto draws out the word to a parody of its original meaning—he wants this stranger’s attention on him for just a little longer, even if he has to needle him to get it. He tells himself it’s only because he has a thing for nice hands. “Just, you know, finders’ magic is kinda my specialty. I could give you some tips.”  
  
“He already found the restaurant,” his client quips. “You sure he needs any more help?”  
The stranger’s face is calm but his eyebrows quirk and in a moment his mouth does the same—it’s a weird combination, wry and enchanting. He unwinds the thread from his wrist.  
  
“…Not what I was looking for,” he says. “That—it’s more complicated than that.”  
This is Bokuto’s first invitation from Akaashi Keiji, or maybe the first suggestion that he invite himself. It is the first of many findings.  
  
***  
  
Akaashi puts down the needle and thread and scoops a glittering assortment of beads back into their box. He leans back and pinches the bridge of his nose. His vision is swimming.  
  
“Beyond my knack, probably,” he mutters. It’s the first time he’s admitted to himself what he should have said when he was offered the job. But Nekomata’s an old client, not someone he can easily refuse, and finding a lost ring belonging to the old man’s granddaughter—it hadn’t sounded so hard. After quite a few tries, though, he’s starting to see that it might be outside the scope of his abilities.  
  
What he makes are influence charms—fragile things that bring temporary, practical magic into the life of the holder. A ring of heartwood webbed with silk is hope-for-diligence, good to hang in your doorway during exams for some extra focus and clarity. A thumb-size packet of herbs trimmed with feathers is hope-for-order, and tucked under your pillow it helps nudge the clutter of your life into a manageable shape.  
  
There are others, short-lived but useful, and years of practice have made his unique. Everyone needs things like this—it’s not so bad a living. But it’s nothing like the haphazardness practically printed on Bokuto Koutaro’s dog-eared excuse for a business card. The card smells faintly of curry, and does not suggest an owner with much interest in contingency plans. Akaashi guesses that Bokuto’s finder’s knack is a strong one, or else why would he be so confident in an odd-jobs business run from a cafe table in the park? He thinks again of their meeting and is surprised by his own impulse to laugh.  
  
He’d been cautiously hopeful that time. The brown-thread finder’s charm was better than his first couple of attempts, but by the time the tug of magic led him to that noodle shop he was sure something was out of whack. _Not the place_ , he’d been thinking to himself, not really surprised even, when Bokuto appeared in front of him, insulted his finders’ charm, and snared him in the unexpected trap of wild hair, bright eyes, and a guileless smile.  
  
Well, no—Akaashi isn’t _snared_. They’ve only met once, after all, and even if he doesn’t doubt the strength of Bokuto’s knack, he’s pretty sure the guy would make a terrible teacher. He slides the curry-scented business card around on his desk. He’s not going to call. He’s not going to call.  
  
In the end he doesn’t have to. Three days later, he’s following his next attempt at a finder’s charm, his attention totally focused on the power branching through the lattice of thread. He has to blink a few times to bring the face across the street into focus.  
  
Bokuto is holding an energy drink in one hand and a taxidermied owl in the other and staring at him in shock. In the next second the look has vanished so completely that Akaashi wonders if it was ever there, and Bokuto is waving and crossing the street to join him.  
  
“Hey, that’s not such a disaster,” is his greeting—he crowds close like they’ve known each other for years and the threads criss-crossing Akaashi’s wrist vibrate like plucked strings of a mandolin. “Those beads are a really nice choice. Good for channeling. I dunno about the pattern, though…?”  
  
“I don’t remember asking you,” Akaashi tells him mildly.  
  
“’S all good!” Bokuto says carelessly, like Akaashi’s admitted to inconveniencing him. “I’m not on a job right now.” The taxidermied owl under his arm blinks slowly and rotates its head to look at Akaashi. He stares back challengingly, and then feels a little absurd.  
  
“What about the feather, then?” Akaashi is surprised at himself. “I wasn’t sure whether a pinion or a covert would work better. Still not sure.”  
  
Bokuto examines the feather dangling from the string. “Something’s off,” he announces. “It’s the right size but maybe it’s in conflict with the other materials you used? Whatever it is, it’s not harmonizing so well.”  
  
Self-conscious, Akaashi flexes his fingers and watches the beads slide back and forth. Bokuto’s eyes lock on his hand and his expression turns odd and abstracted for a second, like he’s listening to a voice on another line.  
  
“These materials aren’t my usual,” Akaashi says, wanting to justify himself, wanting Bokuto to know what it is he really does. “I make influence charms. Finder’s magic…this is new to me.”  
  
“It’s not a migratory bird, but—hold that a sec, thanks.” Suddenly Bokuto’s energy drink is in Akaashi’s hand, and Bokuto is feeling through the tawny plumage of his owl. He presents a long primary, sleek as a knife and faintly mottled in shades of milk-and-coffee brown. “Try this, hey? Might do you some good.”  
  
Akaashi doesn’t ask why. He pockets the feather and ignores the accusatory stare of the taxidermied bird, and then Bokuto’s phone rings and it’s a client and traffic starts up from the intersection and the city is spinning on again, each of them with their own threads to follow, to wherever it is they’re meant to go.  
  
***  
  
It’s the third time they meet that Bokuto begins to suspect. Akaashi has a skillful spiral of red thread around his wrist and a dogged expression on his usually calm face. The red thread stirs recognition in the back of Bokuto’s brain, and he loses precious time studying the way it overlaps the flex of muscles and tendons in Akaashi’s wrist.  
  
“Fancy meeting you here,” he says, fighting the momentary, confusing shudders from his internal compass. It’s giving him the same signal he gets when he visualizes a client’s destination or lost possession, a tug of certainty, a need for forward motion. The feeling lives behind his sternum, equal distance between heart and belly. Akaashi’s dark eyes pin him where he stands.  
  
After a moment the feeling fades. “How’s it going with the feather?” Bokuto asks, rocking forward on his toes, bouncing back. The tawny feather he gave Akaashi is tucked right against the vein on the inside of his wrist. When Bokuto bends closer, though, what draw his eye are the red thread and the amber beads strung along it, the arrowlike bits of clear glass. He’s seen this somewhere before.  
  
“I thought about what you said last time,” Akaashi says. “Changed materials. I took apart some hope-for-order charms I never finished to make this. All familiar components, but—well. It’s better, but I don’t think it’s quite right yet.”  
  
“Then, coffee,” Bokuto hears himself blurt out, like he’s reading from a list titled _Things To Do When Hot Strangers Don’t Immediately Flee Your Acquaintance_. Akaashi’s eyebrows arch delicately, like speech is too clunky to convey the depth of his dry skepticism. Bokuto feels himself warming to the idea already, though. “We keep running into each other, so why don’t we grab some coffee and, yanno, dispel the mystery?”  
  
Akaashi almost laughs, he’s sure of it. Bokuto throws in an inviting eyebrow-wiggle, hoping to coax it out of him, but in the next moment Akaashi schools his features and taps the charm on his wrist.  
  
“I have to follow this,” he says. “It’s not accurate, but I think it will lead me somewhere close. I know I’m getting there.”  
  
“Mind if I tag along, then?”  
  
Akaashi looks surprised at himself as he admits that, no, he doesn’t.  
  
The finders’ charm leads them twisting and turning through the glass-and-tile labyrinth of the city. Voices flock in the streets, the rumbling of overhead trains sinks into their skulls. Light splinters and wheels off the shiny flanks of a hundred office buildings and malls and apartment complexes. Bokuto is dizzy with it, he always is at least a little.  
  
That’s what it is to live in the city—and what could be better than to thread through the bright chaos and pinpoint a single sought-after thing, hidden from all others’ view? He and Akaashi fall into step easily.  
  
He tells Akaashi stories. He has no end of them, weird scrapes and long-winded punch lines pulled from the trawler net of his travels through this city. Akaashi doesn’t laugh, but he listens and swaps stories of his own about hunting for the ingredients of his work and wrangling his clients. Every so often, he stares at the red-thread charm intently, as if trying to pick it apart with his eyes alone. The look on his face is drawn, confused, like he’s just out of reach of the thing he needs and he knows it.  
  
***  
  
Akaashi is deeply embarrassed when his latest charm leads them to a twenty-four-hour parking garage. The power in the red thread has been guttering for a while, and now it skews, flickers, and disappears. He glances at Bokuto and is surprised to see him examining the pattern critically, with a sharper expression than Akaashi has ever seen him wear. He’s still a little lulled by the joyful cadence of Bokuto’s voice, still on the verge of laughter—tender after all the stories that have passed between them. It’s a startling feeling, so he keeps quiet.  
  
Bokuto reaches for his wrist, hesitates a moment, and taps at the thread. “You’re on the right track,” he mutters, both of them realizing that this is the first time they’ve really touched. “With the repurposed materials and all. Still…”  
  
Akaashi watches an indecipherable but familiar look cross Bokuto’s face. His focus has shifted in depth and direction, somewhere inside, and Akaashi can tell that it confuses him. After a moment he gently withdraws his hand and Bokuto’s expression returns to normal.  
  
It is at this point, too, that Akaashi begins to suspect—what? He can’t say. He is just beginning to learn the moods and secrets of finder’s magic, the way it reflects into his one small life the million traceries of chance that lie beneath the surface of things. He fingers the feather nestled against his wrist, and wonders if he’s being steered.  
  
“This isn’t it,” he says unnecessarily. “I’d know if it was. Sorry to drag you all this way for nothing.”  
  
Bokuto shakes himself like a wet dog and grins—Akaashi is still startled by how quickly he can go from lost in thought to effervescent.  
  
“Hey, it’s nothing! But if it bugs you, maybe you could make it up to me with coffee?”  
  
It’s easy to say yes. Somehow this seems right, like he’s settling into place.  
  
“Sure,” Akaashi says. “I’ll treat you. I know where we can go.”  
  
Unlike Bokuto, who seems to crank on under inexhaustible if occasionally erratic Energizer-Bunny batteries, Akaashi’s blood is probably a full third coffee. He finds that it conducts sarcastic disdain much better than tea or sports drinks. There’s a place right by the park that he likes, a little cramped, but its sidewalk tables are angled for a nice view of the trees in the afternoon light. That same light slants golden across Bokuto’s face as he takes the opposite seat at Akaashi’s usual table.  
  
***  
Bokuto pretends to study the coffee menu and tries not to vibrate like he’s already downed five or six cups of whatever fancy imported stuff this place has on offer. The air smells good, a mixture of the warm toasty scent of the shop and the breeze coming off the treetops. From around the edge of the menu, he stares hard at the red thread encircling Akaashi’s wrist. The amber drops wink at him, and he spaces out for a moment trying to make them into a pattern. He brings a hand to his jacket pocket and forces himself to look Akaashi in the face. He’s going to settle this now. He has to.  
  
Two weeks ago, on the day before he met Akaashi, he found a cloth charm abandoned by the park fountain. It was frayed and a little gray with wear, and the tie had broken. He had scooped it up for no particular reason, admiring the neat stitching and the fragrance that still lingered. It had a comforting smell of herbs he couldn’t name but knew he’d smelled before, maybe touched a long time ago.  
  
He’d been in one of his moods then. Feeling low, a little more ready than usual to dwell on things he hoped for but hadn’t yet found.  
He might have—no way to be sure about these things—he picked up the charm and he might have made a wish.  
  
“Hey,” he says now, putting down his menu and leaning forward. Akaashi looks up at him, calm and more easeful than Bokuto has ever seen him. Bokuto’s eyes jump to the red thread and away again, and he reaches into his pocket. He lays the found charm on the table between them.  
  
“Did you make this?” he asks.  
  
Now that he sees it side by side with the newer thread and beads from Akaashi’s workshop, he knows the answer. Amber, glass, deep red. He feels like a tuning fork that’s just been struck. Akaashi examines the charm, holding it between two fingers.  
  
“Yeah, it’s one of mine.” He looks back to Bokuto, frowning in confusion. “Where’d you get it?”  
  
“Found it a while back,” Bokuto says, not trusting himself with more. “What kind is it? I’ve never been good with these things.”  
  
“Hope-for-order,” Akaashi tells him without even looking. “That’s the kind I’m best at, to be honest.”  
  
“So it’s not…you know, a love charm or something?” Bokuto says desperately, and the conclusion he’s reaching for won’t come together in words, it confounds him at every turn. It’s infuriating. He feels like he’s spinning on the spot.  
  
“I don’t do love charms.” Akaashi blinks, slow, and then his eyes widen and he leans forward a little, fingers twining and untwining, wrists resting on the table. His composure has fallen away. It feels like a gift. “…You don’t strike me as the type to wish for order,” he says.  
  
“Nah,” Bokuto lets out a shaky laugh. “Not me. But—just tell me right now if I’m talking crazy, okay? Didn’t something happen—”  
  
“Something is happening,” Akaashi says. He is silent for a while, staring at the little scrap of cloth and beads on the table between them. Bokuto tries to sort it all out in his mind, wondering, is it really a wish if you didn’t know you were making it? His knack, Akaashi’s craft—how many people does it take to make an unreal thing come true?  
  
“…I’ll tell you something about hope-for-order charms,” Akaashi says haltingly. “Hope-for-order is all people need most of the time, a little boost that helps them manage the rest for themselves. Or helps the universe manage it for them. But it’s a smaller version of a big spell, maybe the biggest.”  
  
Bokuto waits, his hands still for once. Akaashi runs the charm between his fingers. “Hope-for-harmony,” he says. “Things like that—real luck, real providence, they’re too big to fit in your pocket. The magics we work are things we’ve scaled down to fit us. We make symbols, start a conversation with the real thing.  
  
And it’s the same for order—the cloth and pattern, the incantation, they come together to evoke a little bit of that bigger force. There are certain herbs…”  
  
Akaashi goes on listing the ingredients, a slow litany of small magics made big, and the sound of his voice tips Bokuto’s internal compass towards him as inexorably as the tide. There’s a magnet in his ribcage, gravity welling in his stomach. It’s not a spell, it’s not a spell, but he’s enchanted anyway. His compass spins but he is at the base of the needle. It’s a good clear view from the center.  
  
He reaches across the table and scoops up the charm and presses it and Akaashi’s hands between his own. His finder’s knack vibrates behind his breastbone to tell him, _here, here, here it is. Here you are_. Akaashi stops talking and blinks down at their clasped hands, the ragged tail of the charm trailing between his index finger and Bokuto’s ring finger.  
  
“Is this the place,” he says. It’s not quite a question. Bokuto runs his thumb along the gentle curve of thread on Akaashi’s wrist.  
  
“Dunno,” he says. “But, hey. You and me—let’s find out.”

**Author's Note:**

> trying something new, not sure if it worked. but is it, in fact, a cheesy red string au in disguise? no comment


End file.
